Transcription:
There are a lot of details in the burial itself. We surround the grave and the mourners because they are so vulnerable. So we create physical community around them of protectiveness so they don’t feel vulnerable or open to anything. They’re cocooned inside. It is a mitzvah commandment that we physically bury each other. We consider that to be an act of chesed, one of the greatest of acts of compassion that we can give for each other because there is no expectation of a thank you. The person has passed away. There is absolutely no expectation that they will ever thank us. It’s the kind of thing we do for each other because that’s what a human being does for another human being and it’s that moment of humanity and connection of humanity and that understanding that we bury each other physically. So whether we take a handful of dirt or soil or we use the shovel. When we use the shovel traditionally for the first shovel full anyone is doing they turn the shovel backwards and use the back of the shovel because we want to say this is like no other moment where we use a shovel. We separate the routine of it in that moment that way. If we’re using a shovel and we stop, we take the shovel and we put it back into the mound of earth. We don’t pass the shovel to the next person who’s waiting because we never want to even symbolically think we could G-d forbid that we pass sorrow and pain from one to the other. So we put it in the earth. The earth Jewishly is our great neutralizer. Everything becomes neutral in the earth and so the shovel goes back into the earth. The next person will now come and take it. This continues until the coffin is covered and in some communities until burial is complete and then mourners’ kaddish begins. We tear clothes in that moment of grief because the Torah prohibits us from hurting our bodies. In the ancient world people who were in grief would knock their teeth out or pull their hair out or scar their skin, wound themselves. They would bloodlet. They would they would do all damage to themselves because of the pain and the Torah prohibits us from doing that but the pain’s still there and wanting to tear something is still there and so we tear clothing. We tear our clothes and the idea of tearing it because when you tear a garment even if you sew it back you’ll see where it was torn. It can never go back to what it was before. You will always see that it’s torn and again going back to when these traditions started in the ancient world people did tear their clothes. It wasn’t something that they were given to tear. It was their clothes and so they would then have to mend it afterwards because people didn’t have multiple wardrobes. So you would always look at someone be able to see if they’d lost because you’d see something was mended and it also is very symbolic of being able to say it never goes back to what it was before. It’s always with me but then so is the person and so it you then carry all of that with you and other people recognize it and know a little bit about a little bit more about who you present to be by understanding what you’ve been through and I think that is tremendously beautiful and that’s private.